ABSTRACT
Introduction Historically, the beginnings of the establishment of a social protection system in Brazil go back to the 1930s. This was a time of significant social and economic transformations, when the development of the country was marked by the transition from an agro-exporting model of development to an urban-industrial one. The political dynamics of the country began to include the participation of an emerging working class. As a result, there was an increasing demand for the satisfaction of collective needs that emerged as a consequence of the process of industrialization and urbanization that was underway. Thus, the Brazilian social protection system started to develop and expand from the 1930s onwards. This process was intensified in the 1970s, in the context of the military dictatorship’s authoritarianism, in which social programs and services possibly took on the function of minimizing the strong repression against the working class and the popular sectors in general. In this context social protection had the role of contributing to the reproduction of the workforce and the legitimization of the emergency regime. The 1980s were marked by the expansion of social movements in the field of labor, with the emergence of national central labor unions and neighborhood movements demanding the extension of social rights and the redemption of the social debt that resulted from the wage squeeze and high income concentration during the period of the military dictatorship. A new social movement and an authentic trade union movement arose in the context of the political reorganization of Brazilian society, focused on direct political action against the instituted repression. The struggles in the area of production, reproduction and party politics around the demands for political participation and the extension and universalization of social rights were united, culminating in the Federal Constitution of 1988. The latter significantly broadened social rights in an attempt to overcome the so-called regulated citizenship (Santos, 1987), which was restricted to the employees who worked in the formal sector of the economy and were regularly registered. It prioritized the criterion of actual need instead of the exclusiveness of the criterion of merit as a guideline for social protection policies in Brazil.
